A beautiful old French style castello it was, by no means spoilt in our eyes by having been left with rough brick. Now we hear that its ambitious owners have faced it with stone and are themselves charmed with the result. No doubt its original picturesqueness had its disadvantages, for innumerable birds built under the eaves amid those rough bricks. At the approach of any vehicle the air was full of flying wings. The flutter and the sound of them! We thought the place all delightful and characteristic; wonderfully more attractive than the pompous banality of the now renewed mansion, photographs of which we have since had mendaciously to admire.
Inside it was cool and charming; full of old French furniture and irreplaceable family relics. Some of these have recently been sold, to defray, no doubt, part of the cost of the new exterior.
The sedan chair of Madame la Maréchale in pre-Revolution days remains in my memory as a regret; it was a wonder of old Vernis-Martin. We hope they have kept the great flags that used to hang in the hall. The reigning châtelaine did not really care for any of these old things. Her heart was set on the joys of a Roman appartement, and its concomitant social gaieties.
GRANDCHILDREN
There was a spacious white hall with impossible paintings of a boar hunt on its walls, opening upon an endless series of reception rooms. And through these lofty chambers three little children were running about in little white linen tunics, and nothing on underneath, because of the heat of the weather. Their hair was cut in mediæval fashion, straight across the forehead and straight again across the shoulders. There was also a most adorable baby of eleven months carried about by a soft-eyed Balia. Out of the mountains she had come, this creature, to cherish another’s child! And a series of misfortunes had fallen upon her little home since her departure: the death of her own nursling followed by the death of the cow! “Cara moglie,” her husband wrote on each occasion, “do not grieve. It is the will of God!”
There were no doubt other very simple reasons for these catastrophes: the pitiable poverty of the family which had made it necessary for the poor woman to sell her mother-rights, and possibly the tainted milk of the sick cow which had poisoned the little mountaineer. But call it fate, or the intolerable economic system of modern Italy, it came round in the end to the same thing. “Do not grieve, cara moglie. It is the will of God!”
She had done her best to help her own, and this was her comfort in her sorrow. It was not such a bad comfort; and the most advanced thinker cannot prove after all that it was not the will of God.
It was difficult, too, for the foster-mother to weep long when Baby Maddalena danced on the stone of the terrace with little bare brown feet. She had the bluest eyes and the brownest face that ever we beheld, and laughed and gurgled as she danced, with very high action, upheld by the ends of her sash by the adoring Balia, whose own face and neck above her string of gold beads were the colour of a ripe apricot.
It would be difficult to have devised a fortnight of greater interest, amusement, and quaintness than that of this Piedmontese visit. It was a thoroughly foreign household. The handsome white-bearded athletic father of the Chatelaine, tied to his chair by an attack of gout, had his apartments downstairs. And on an upper floor the mother of the Marchese had her own complete establishment, including a wonderful library, all tawny gold. There was a baroque Chapel; and one of our most vivid recollections was our pulling the children down by their sashes as they swung themselves over the tops of the benches, doubled up like golden fleeces till their curly heads and their little shoes touched.
One thing never to be omitted was to watch Monte Rosa at sunset. The night before our departure there was a thunderstorm far, far away in those Alps where Monte Rosa rises in beauty. At every flash, peak beyond peak shone out in distances hitherto wrapped away even from the imagination.